Category: Future of Marketing

Facebook has quietly become the biggest relationship-marketing provider for many brands.

For many marketers, their Facebook fan bases have become their largest web presence, outstripping brand sites or e-mail programs either because a brand’s traditional web-based “owned media” is atrophying or because more consumers are migrating to social media.

Coca-Cola, with its 10.7 million Facebook fans, has three to four times the Facebook fan base as MyTown and Foursquare have registered users. (There are at least 11 brands whose Facebook fan pages have quietly grown bigger than the biggest geo-location providers.) That certainly trumps U.S. unique visitors to Coke’s brand website, which fell by more than 40% to 242,000 in July compared to a year ago, per Compete.

Kraft Foods’ Oreo is the No. 3 brand page on Facebook as tracked by DBM/Scan, with an 8.7 million fan base growing at a clip of 71,000 a day. But the multi-brand site where its web presence has been hosted, NabiscoWorld.com, has seen U.S. traffic decline from 1.2 million in July 2009 to 321,000 last month.

The new trend in Marketing. Getting a touch of nature into your technology products. Imitate and mime biological structures, gestures and movements and merge it with the latest 3D animation methodoligies – The Result: “Biomimic Marketing”.

If the Twitter Management is not inventing advertising on Twitter.com the users just do it themselves.

Twitter users inetgrating advertisements in their stream of updates have begun adopting new standards for disclosure.

Many ads are now being marked with tags — “#spon” for sponsored tweets, “#paid” or “#samp” for those who received sample products — based on guidelines released Thursday by the Word of Mouth Marketing Assn. (WOMMA). The new instructions are a response to the Federal Trade Commission’s call for more explicit disclosure from bloggers.

The Superbowl is nearly as famous for its commercial breaks as for the game itself. In fact, the commercials are more memorable than the game for many viewers – a study by ad agency Venables, Bell & Partners showed that 66% of viewers remember their favorite advertiser from the 2009 Superbowl and only 39% recall which team won. However, this exposure comes at a hefty price, rates for Superbowl commercials run far above any other TV event because the game draws around 95 million viewers in the US alone. 30-second spots run close to $3m and the game typically includes 50 to 60 spots. PepsiCo has advertised its cola during every Superbowl for over 20 years but it has become more and more difficult (and expensive) to stand out from the field.

Instead of running the risk of being an also-ran, PepsiCo announced in December that it wouldn’t be advertising its cola during the Superbowl this year, instead it unveiled a $20m fund in which it is looking for people, businesses, and non-profits with ideas that will have a positive impact on US communities. Anyone can submit and rate ideas and each month those rated highest receive grants of between $5k and $250k. Moving away from the norm seems to have worked, in a recent survey by Nielsen, Pepsi’s ‘Refresh Everything’ campaign accounted for more than 21% of the media coverage and online buzz around Superbowl advertising. Given that PepsiCo usually spends in the region of $30m on Superbowl advertising breaking away from the norm seems to have paid off.

The World Economic Forum is developing the most exclusive online Social Network, called WELCOM. The name is an acronym for “The World Economic Leaders COMmunity”. The community will inhabit the top 10.000 world leaders, executives, managers, CEO, politicians, visionaries and movers and shakers. The social network will offer many collaboration and communication tools, such as contacts, groups, chat, mail, video call, file sharing etc. So many conversations will happen behind a big “digital security wall”.

Here are three Screenshots of the WEF WELCOM platform:

Description at the Website of the World Economic Forum (WEF):
WELCOM is a powerful new online communication and collaboration space designed specifically for the world’s top decision-makers. With a range of innovative tools for locating and accessing expertise, sharing knowledge, and meeting and working with peers, WELCOM empowers a multistakeholder approach to addressing the most pressing business and global governance challenges.

Calvin Lui, CEO of Tumri, is talking about new opportunities for Online Advertising. Tumri is already serving over one billion impressions per month. They are currently only active in USA, but will expand to Europe and Asia this year.

One key advantage of Tumri is that “the platform delivers highly relevant advertising messages to consumers while lowering creative production costs and timelines.”

Due to recent Social Media Marketing projects at Ahead of Time we did a screening of relevant Social Media Marketing Campaigns, Cases & Examples. Here is a list of more than 300 companies who are active in the Social Media landscape.

We are currently working with full power on the preparations for the upcoming manager tours. It is really great to start a “conversation” with our attendees, speakers, experts and interested people who just follow our blog. During the whole preparation work we are integrating all ideas and feedback to create a really high-level program.

Yesterday I met Mike Hemingway, Global Managing Director at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, in midtown Manhatten. Mike will talk about his innovative marketing activities for the beauty brand “Dove“. The viral video “Dove Evolution” was watched by millions of people (over 6 million on youtube alone). I think it is the most effective viral marketing campaign so far and Unilever is really setting new standards to start a conversation with its consumers.

Today is the big opening of the Second Life project of Q110 – the Deutsche Bank of the future. After many hard working days and nights we are proud to open this exciting project to the public. CScout is attending the Press-Conference today in Berlin, too.

The project-work together with IBM and Vok Dams was powerful and great fun.
More Information on Q110 and the whole project is online at www.q110.de.

Have a look at this great format and imagine what will happen in a couple of years. An automated News Show is also a great idea for Google News and even for TV Stations around the world. This might change the future of TV dramatically.
Do we still need human TV-Presenters at all?

News at Seven is an automatic system that crafts daily news shows. It finds the news you are interested in; edits it; finds relevant images, videos, and external opinions; and then presents it all using a virtual news team working in a virtual studio. News at Seven is a uniquely compelling experience that can present traditional news–augmented with supplemental images, videos, and opinions from the blogosphere—all without human intervention.